Oh Human, What Should We Do with You?
by St Basil the Great
Feast of St John the Russian of Evia
Anno Domini 2020, May 27
GOD IS
upon earth. God is among human beings (cf. Bar. 3.38). He does not establish the Law by fire and trumpet and smoking mountain (cf. Ex. 20.18), nor by thick darkness and a gloom and a storm that frightens the soul of those who hear it (cf. Deut. 4.11; 5.22; Heb. 12.18-19). Instead, by means of a body He engages in gentle and pleasant conversation with those who are the same in kind. God is in flesh. He is not active at intervals as He was among the prophets. Instead He possesses a humanity connatural and united to Himself, and restores all humanity to Himself through flesh the same as ours in kind.
So then, one might say, “How did the splendor come to all by means of one? How can divinity come to be in flesh?” As fire comes to be in iron: not by a change of place, but by a sharing of itself. For the fire does not go out of itself and into the iron; rather, while remaining in its place, it shares its own power with the iron. It is in no way diminished when it shares itself, and the whole of it fills whatever shares in it. So it is in this way too that God the Word did not move out of Himself when He dwelt among us (Jn. 1.14). Nor did He undergo a change when the Word became flesh (ibid.). Heaven was not deprived of what it contained, and earth received the heavenly one within its own embraces. Do not suppose that the divinity fell. For it did not move from one place to another as bodies do. Do not imagine that the divinity was altered when it was transferred into flesh. For the immortal is immutable.
So then, one might ask, “How was God the Word not filled with bodily weakness?” We reply: as the fire does not share in the distinguishing marks of the iron. Iron is black and cold, but nonetheless when turned in the fire it takes on the outward form of fire. The iron glows, yet the fire is not blackened. The iron is set ablaze, yet it does not cool the flame. So too it is with the human flesh of the Lord: it shares in the divinity, yet it does not impart its own weakness to the divinity. Can it be that you did not grant to the divinity an activity on par with that of this mortal fire? Did you imagine passibility in the Impassible One on the basis of human weakness? Are you puzzled how the easily corruptible nature can have incorruptibility through its communion with God? Realize that it’s a mystery. God is in flesh that He may kill the death that lurks therein. For as the harm caused by poisonous drugs can be overcome by antidotes when they are assimilated by the body, and as the darkness residing in a house is dissolved by the introduction of light, so too the death that dominates in human nature is obliterated by the presence of divinity. And as ice in water, for as long as it is night and dark, is stronger than the liquid that contains it, but the warming sun melts the ice by its ray, so too death rules until the advent of Christ, but when the saving grace of God appears (Titus 2.11) and the sun of righteousness rises (Mal. 4.2), death is swallowed up in victory (1 Cor. 15.54), unable to bear the visitation of true life.
O the depth of the goodness of God and His love for humanity! In response to His superabundant love for humanity we rebel against being His servants. We seek to know the reason why God is among humans, though we should be adoring His goodness.
O human, what should we do with you? When God remains in the heights, you do not seek Him. When He comes down and converses with you through flesh, you do not receive Him. But how will you be brought into affinity with God when you seek explanations? Realize that God is in flesh for this reason: because the flesh that was cursed needed to be sanctified, the flesh that was weakened needed to be strengthened, the flesh that was alienated from God needed to be brought into affinity with Him, the flesh that had fallen in paradise needed to be led back into heaven.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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